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Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport air traffic controllers warned for years about safety risks, long before the Jan. 29, 2025, midair disaster over the Potomac River, when 67 were killed after a military training helicopter collided with a commercial passenger jet.
“The warning signs were all there,” Emily Hanoka, a former Reagan National controller, told CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday. “Controllers formed local safety councils and every time that a controller made these safety reports, another controller was compiling data to back up the recommendation. And many recommendations were made, and they never went too far.”
Hanoka described pressure to keep traffic moving at an airport handling roughly 800 daily flights, including the use of tightly timed operations on a constrained runway system.
“Some hours are overloaded, to the point where it’s over the capacity that the airport can handle,” Hanoka, who clocked out just before the fatal crash that night, added.
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“There was definitely a pressure. If you do not move planes, you will gridlock the airport.”
Notably, it was not the air traffic of the commercial airlines, but a military training aircraft flying at the incorrect altitude through “helicopter alley” that crashed into the unsuspecting airliner.
A U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter crashed into the side of an American Eagle regional jet approaching Reagan National just before landing, killing all 67 people aboard both aircraft. Federal investigators later issued urgent safety recommendations focused on separating helicopter and fixed-wing traffic near the airport.
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Since the disaster, regulators have moved to tighten procedures.
There were multiple near-misses just a day before the disaster, according to CBS, and 85 near-collisions reported between 2021 and 2024 during the Biden administration.
“There were obvious cracks in the system, there were obvious holes,” Hanoka said. “You had frontline controllers ringing that bell for years and years, saying this is not safe. This cannot continue. Please change this. And that didn’t happen.”
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The airport’s 25 million airline passengers a year is reportedly 10 million more than its intended capacity.
To handle the load, Hanoka described “squeeze play” maneuvers unique to that crammed airspace and three runways where two aircraft are on one runway within seconds of each other.
“A squeeze play is when everything is dependent on an aircraft rolling, an aircraft slowing, and you know it’s gonna be a very close operation,” she said. “And that is a really common operation.”
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Air traffic controllers coming from other locales give the airport’s stress work a hard pass, she said.
“So you’ll get new controllers come in, so they’ve transferred from other facilities and they’ll look at the operation and say, ‘Absolutely not,'” she continued. “And they’ll withdraw from training. And that, when I was there, was about 50%.
“About half of the people that walked in the building to train would say, ‘Absolutely not.'”
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“It was surprising walking into that work environment, how close aircraft were,” Hanoka said.
Reporting last week said the FAA suspended the use of visual separation between helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft in that airspace and shifted controllers toward radar-based separation, while restrictions were also imposed on certain helicopter operations near Reagan National.
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The safety concerns Hanoka described align with broader findings from investigators. The National Transportation Safety Board blamed systemic FAA failures and found the crash was preventable, with concerns including overreliance on visual separation and longstanding risks in the airspace around Reagan National.
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